The Policing Culture

Of course police officers must be held accountable for inhumane acts, but it should never get to this. Recruiting, training, and the very culture have to change.

“Man, I was hitting him with straight haymakers, dog.” Is that an MMA star being interviewed about their last bout? No, that’s a Memphis police officer bragging about beating Tyre Nichols.

“We have to talk about this institutionalized police culture that has this unwritten law, [that] you can engage in excessive use of force against Black and Brown people, said Ben Crump, the lawyer for Tyre Nichols’s family.

If anything about these deaths at the hands of police officers has become clear over the last couple of years, it is that the color of the police officer doesn’t matter—it’s the color of the victim. The U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics reveals that African-Americans in the United States are 3.5 times more likely than Whites to be killed by officers when the victim was not attacking or did not have a weapon. Minorities who are less likely to have money, power, or social standing, and who are less able to engage quality legal aid, are ripe for the beating. As conservative pundit Charlie Sykes observed, “Brutality is an ideology, not just an impulse.” The problem must be stopped before it can start.

Recruitment, (and training, and supervision) is what’s broken here. There will be a predictable rush to enact new laws, but they will fail because they’ll propose to provide punishment after the fact. We need to take action before these tragedies occur.

Because authoritarians are naturally drawn to a job that delivers almost entirely unquestioned power, police departments must do a better job of rooting out sadists, sociopaths, and those with violent tendencies, before they become Certified Police Officers.

Finding cops is tough. Finding good ones is tougher. The job itself is stressful and unattractive to a lot of people, and better screening will disqualify many who now apply. The pay scale fails to motivate some who would be good police officers, so rather than passing new laws that feel good in the moment but will have no lasting effect, let’s pay better, and put a little money into front-end screening, so we can stop pouring huge amounts into back-end legal settlements.

Until there is wholesale change at the recruiting and personality testing levels, we need to adopt a transparency rule like that in New York state which repealed an egregious rule, known as 50a, that kept records of police misconduct sealed and shielded from public view. We also need to take misconduct investigations out of local jurisdictions in favor of a state’s Attorney General. 

Also endemic in the system is the fact that policing is a very closed society. Cops famously take care of their own. The tragic incidents that gain infamy are almost always initially under- or mis-reported. The spin-cycle starts when a spokesperson stands in front of a bank of cameras to explain why their colleagues have shot or beaten someone to death over a broken tail light.

Their strategy—I believe it must be a strategy after so many incidents—is to obfuscate and delay. The goal is to under-inform, misinform, talk about how an investigation has been mounted, that it will take time, and how the public should not jump to conclusions. All these tactics are in the service of slowing events, pushing off any assignment of blame, and generally waiting for the spotlight to move on and for temperatures to cool, before announcing that very little or nothing will be done.

The advent of cameras everywhere has changed the calculus of denial. That, and the George Floyd murder, have accelerated the time line and disrupted official foot dragging.

Also in a reset, we must restrict “qualified immunity.” From Wikipedia, “[it is the] legal doctrine that shields government officials from personal liability when their actions violate ‘clearly established’ federal law.” Currently, prosecutors know most complaints are losers, and that police officers are “judgement-proof“ when they get to trial, so they never get to trial.

We’ll get nowhere until we take away police unions’ powers to protect bad cops from consequences. We need transparency, a national registry of police who abuse their power, and legislative reform of the qualified immunity laws that protect police officers from civil liability. The unions oppose all three.

The next time you hear the phrase, “Officer-involved shooting,” think of the unions. That is their focus-grouped verbiage, and you have to admit it sounds better than, “The police shot another citizen.” Let’s hear it for bloodless euphemisms and the television news directors who play along.

Law enforcement is an insular and largely self-regulated career. The natural desire to protect one’s own is a recipe for these kinds of disasters. It is way too rare that bad police officers are held to account, so let’s screen-out the bad actors before they take the stage.  

©2023 Jon Sinton